I attach a great deal of importance to international development aid. After all, I was for two years the minister responsible for it, but I have never been uncritical of it. It is precisely because I attach such importance to it, that I am horrified when any of it is wasted.

When aid is wasted the damage is twofold: First in the ‘opportunity cost’ of the good use that it might otherwise have been put to; second because that waste, magnified by the press, undermines the whole case for such aid in the eyes of the public.

Last week I saw press coverage criticising the fact that some of our aid was being used to support the Chinese film industry. Without having to read further, I knew the culprit: the ‘Prosperity Fund’.

This fund was set up by George Osborne when he was Chancellor and was given £1.5 billion to be disbursed over a five year period. I was one of the joint chairmen of the fund along with Greg Hands, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Lord Price the Trade Minister. Its purpose was to use development aid to open up markets, from which there might subsequently arise opportunities to be exploited by UK enterprises.
(The language had to be pretty tight because the expenditure remained governed by the International Development Act 2002 which requires that it be spent for the purpose of eradicating poverty.)

The other members of the board were ministers from spending departments across Whitehall. It was part of a strategy to reduce the proportion of development aid disbursed by the Department of International Development to only 75% of the total, and to divide the rest between Whitehall departments whose budgets were otherwise being severely cut.

Although I ‘read the riot act’ to the board, pointing out the narrow definition of what can count as official development aid, and that government policy was not to tie aid to trade, and that all expenditure must be in accordance with the very limited provisions of the 2002 Act, and that departments would bear full responsibility for any projects that they sponsored, nevertheless I knew that I was watching a car crash in slow motion.

It was obvious to me that the sorts of markets that were going to generate subsequent opportunities for trade, were not going to be in the world’s most fragile, disordered, misgoverned, and poorest states; the sort of states that are in desperate need of jobs; the states that generate waves of migrants; the states that breed terrorism and grievance. These are the states where we need to deploy our aid, in our own national interest, in order that we can prosper in a more stable and peaceful world.

Rather, the targets of the fund, given its objectives, were bound to be in countries, though still qualifying for aid under international rules, were no longer what we would consider ‘poor’. It was in the rapidly developing economies of China, India, and Brazil that the fund’s opportunities would be found. And so it has proved.

After years of denying to outraged constituents that we were giving aid to China, now apparently we are.
A spectacular own goal.

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, is just the latest politician to call for the abandonment of the Government’s immigration reduction target.

In the light of the recent experience of some members of the ‘Windrush generation’, where previously government policy sought to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants, the new Home Secretary has indicated that instead, he now prefers the term ‘compliant’ to ‘hostile’. Dianne Abbot, Labour’s immigration spokeswoman has, in effect, called for the abandonment of measures to identify and remove illegal immigrants, including the closure of the detention centres.

I hope that the distinction between ‘compliant’ and ‘hostile’ is just semantics. I regard it as vitally important to both have effective immigration controls and to enforce them rigorously. Not to do so, sends a very powerful signal to hundreds of thousands of other potential illegal immigrants that UK is a soft touch and that it is open house.

As for the suggestion that now is the time to abandon our legal immigration reduction target, it is folly.
Even though we have little experience of it in the New Forest, nevertheless, for years the level of immigration was the top concern in my postbag. Although that concern has abated somewhat, it has not gone away, and if mishandled by politicians it will undoubtedly return.

Ever since in the late 1970ies when Mrs Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, caused a furore when she referred to people feeling “swamped” by the volume of immigration, it became a subject to be treated with proper caution and sensitivity by mainstream politicians.
So many of my correspondents are clearly nervous about expressing their concerns and hedge their use of language fearful that by expressing their opinion they might be thought to be racially prejudiced.
If politicians, unwilling to provoke the opprobrium of a vociferous ‘liberal elite’, fail in their duty to address the issue, then they leave the field open to demagogues of a much less fastidious nature.

I see no good reason to relax immigration policy at this time.
We live in one of the most densely populated countries and we already have an acute housing shortage.
The evidence that immigration boosts economic growth and genuine economic welfare is, at best, mixed.
We already have significant problems arising from the failure to sufficiently assimilate existing immigrant populations.
Whilst London, our capital city, wears as a badge of honour and celebrates its ethnic diversity, and the revelation of the 2011 census that only a minority of its population (44%) is now ‘White British’, for many of our subjects this is something about which they are somewhat uneasy.

A sensible immigration policy needs to take that unease into account. There has to be a balance to deal effectively with short term skills shortages and economic opportunities, whilst reassuring people that immigration is very much under control.

Aside from the constitutional doctrine that proceedings in Parliament may not be questioned in any court, the police have plenty of real work to be getting on with, without their time being wasted on the carryings-on with Mr Speaker.
Apparently, somebody has complained to the police because Mr Speaker, John Bercow, was heard to mutter under his breath “stupid woman” after an acrimonious row with the Leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom.

The row was over the decision by a minister to make a statement on a ‘supply day’. Supply days are given to the Opposition to decide what is debated and, by convention, the Government does not intrude with its own business which would otherwise crowd-out the time available for the subject chosen by the Opposition. For a minister to take up the time with a statement is rather ‘bad form’, and the person responsible for scheduling the business of the House is the Leader.

Now, the Leader of the House has a dual function: as a cabinet minister she is clearly part of the Government, but equally, she is Leader of the whole House of Commons and therefore should be sensitive to the views of back-benchers on both sides of the chamber. Allowing a Government statement on an Opposition day, at the very least, shows a certain lack of sensitivity, which irritated Mr Speaker.

In the scale of crimes and insensitivities however, it doesn’t rank that highly, and it’s not as if it hasn’t happened before under governments of both colours.

The next day Mr Speaker explained -without apologising: He told us that his overheard remark ‘stupid’ referred only to his opinion about the decision to put on a Government statement on an Opposition day, and he stood by it.
The other word: ‘woman’ must have been lost in translation. Certainly, it didn’t refer to the Leader because everyone knows that she is both hard-working and very clever.

Well, who cares anyway?
How many times have any of us MPs muttered something much worse under our breath after receiving a duff reply from the minister at the despatch box. As Ken Clarke pointed out, if we are all to be referred to the police for such indiscretions then not a single member of Parliament would be left.
Frankly, we have more important fish to fry.

Referring the matter to the Police is more than stupid, it’s just plain bonkers.

*

The announcement of another stupid EU directive, this time requiring owners of ride-on mowers to get motor insurance for mowing their own lawns, reminded me of our wisdom in voting to leave this wretched interfering institution and, hopefully, managing it before the directive requires our compliance.
For my own part however, I dispensed with my ride-on a year or so ago, on the grounds that the discipline of having to push one instead, would be beneficial to my weight and consequently to my health.
It is depressing that we are all soon to be asked to pay higher taxes to fund the NHS when so much of its increasing costs are down to the unhealthy lifestyles of its patients, so many of whom don’t seem to realise that their joints and vital organs were never designed to carry the weight that they are placing on them.
Perhaps, as a stealth tax on sitting, the objective of EU directive isn’t so stupid after all?

The Brexit outcome that the EU fear’s most is our adherence to the principle set out and repeated by the Prime Minister that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, and consequently UK leaving the EU without one.

 

This would be the worst outcome for the EU because they have more to lose in terms of the tariffs that they would have to pay; and much more importantly they wouldn’t get the money (the £40 billion or so that has -rather shockingly- been accepted as our ‘divorce’ bill).

 

Why then has the intransigence of the EU negotiating position not reflected this?
Why are they making such a meal of Irish Border issue and refusing to even negotiate on the perfectly reasonable solutions that we have put forward, rather than rejecting them out of hand?

 

I think that they simply do not believe that we will reject a bad deal in preference for no deal.
So, why do I think that the EU doesn’t believe the PM means what she says and that, rather than walking away with no deal, we can be forced into accepting a bad deal, indeed any deal on offer however bad?

 

It is because the EU can see the weakness of the PM’s position in Parliament: They are presuming that she could never get leaving with no deal through Parliament.
Now, we haven’t definitively tested this yet with votes, but the EU is making reasonable suppositions given the absence of a majority in the Commons and the significance of the small number of Tory rebels colluding with the opposition parties.

 

So, how would I do it if I were in the PM’s shoes?
I would proceed on the publicly acknowledged presumption that we were expecting to leave without a deal and that we were making all necessary plans and preparations to do so.
The default position is that we will leave at the end of March next year anyway: If nothing changes then that happens automatically.  So, I’d make it clear that we will simply ‘park’ any legislative process in Parliament until the EU blinks first.
If they don’t blink however, well unfortunately then we will leave with a sub-optimal outcome but, hey, we’ll have £40 Billion to spend on the NHS before the next general election.

 

Of course this plan would provoke a furore in Parliament.
Remember however, Parliament handed the decision to the people in a referendum. The people took Parliament at its word and they voted to take back control of our borders, our laws and our money. If a principal obstacle to effecting that decision of the people is Parliament itself, then we will have to deal with that. Perhaps even proroguing it if necessary.
Clearly, we’re getting into King Charles the First territory here, but then my being in the PM’s shoes was an utterly fanciful notion to start with.
But by heck, there’d have been some changes!

There was a row in the Commons this week about the consequences of ending bursaries for undergraduates studying to become nurses.
The Government ended the Bursary scheme in 2017, enabling nursing students to take a student loan just as a student studying for any other degree might be expected to.  The row was over the fact that in each of the two years since, applications for nursing degrees have fallen sharply (down 13% this year).

I think the anger is largely misplaced. It seemed to me that the real scandal was that so many applicants for nursing were being turned away because there was a shortage of places on courses.
The savings from abolishing the bursary are being used to fund 25% more training places.
So long as the number of well qualified applicants is still sufficient to fill all the places available, including the extra 25%, (and they remain more than sufficient) then the number of nurses will increase, irrespective of the reduction in total number of applicants.

There may also be another benefit: One of the strategic mistakes made by government in the nineteen nineties was to accept the Royal College of Nursing’s  agenda for a ‘degree-only’ nursing profession, and to abolish the status of the State Enrolled Nurse. This mistake accentuated the move to ‘high tech’ nursing and denied to the profession nurses whose primary role was just caring for patients rather than curing them. Sometimes anxious and vulnerable patients need not only to be ‘treated’ but to be spent time with, to be fed, or even just to have someone hold their hand.
The introduction of an entry to the profession through an apprenticeship -which is part of the new scheme- may, I hope, go some way to getting the balance right

Constituents have  sent me a whole stack of cards asking me to back legislation to legalise assisted suicide.
The Commons last debated this in the autumn of 2015 and the proposal was defeated by 330 votes to 118, which I thought was sufficiently overwhelming to settle the issue for quite a few years, but apparently not.

Attempting suicide used to be unlawful until 1961, since when we have the right to end our own lives if we choose.  Someone else doing it for you however, remains a serious criminal offence.

I entirely understand the dreadful dilemma of those with terminal degenerative conditions who want to continue to live whilst there is some quality to life, but want the reassurance that, when the pain and indignity becomes unbearable, someone will be able to able to end it for them, if by then they have lost the capability of doing it for themselves.

My concern however, is that if a convenient and accepted procedure and process becomes established for ending life, it will be a very short step from ‘choice’ to ‘expectation’.  I fear that as elderly and vulnerable people become a greater burden to the healthcare system, their own finances, and their families, there will ever so subtle, and not so subtle expressions of expectation that they will do ‘the decent thing’.

Clearly, going to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end one’s life is an expense and inconvenience that anyone, especially the terminally ill, would want to avoid. Given the awesome finality of what they are planning however, is it really too much to expect of them?

Following the Lords raising two fingers to BREXIT with their amendments requiring us to remain within key elements of the EU (with attendant costs and obligations); hijacking the negotiations to Parliament; and now interfering with our departure date; my inbox is overflowing with outraged demands for the reform of the House of Lords.

I do not think this is the remedy. The problem is not the Lords, but the Commons. The Lords are trying it on because they know that the arithmetic is very tight in the Commons, so given their lordships’ distaste for BREXIT, they think it’s worth a try.
Were the position in the Commons robustly in support of the Government’s BREXIT policy, the Lords would not be bothering.

The Problem in the Commons is a direct consequence of the election last year. The PM, with a majority of only 15, didn’t think it was enough to get BREXIT through Parliament, so she asked the people for a stronger mandate, but they chose not to give her one. And that is why their Lordships believe that they have leave to gum-up the process and the negotiations.

In ordinary circumstances the Lords is just a revising chamber and the overwhelming majority of those legislative revisions are accepted by the Commons. If it really comes to a crunch in a row between the two houses at which neither is prepared to blink first, then ultimately all the Lords can do is delay, until the Commons forces the matter through under the provisions of the 1911 Parliament Act.

My email correspondents demand however, that the Lords become more democratic, by which they mean elected, as is the Senate in the USA, so that it will reflect the popular will.
The greatest obstacle to any such plan, and I have seen two crash in my time, is the House of Commons. Were the Lords to be elected in some way, then that democratic legitimacy would soon enough lead to the demands for real power beyond their current status as a mere revising chamber. That power could only come from the Commons: and we have no intention of giving it up.
As a parliamentary representative of the New Forest, the last thing I would welcome would be some peer on my turf purporting to represent the very same people as I do.
Given this hornets’ nest, there is little appetite in any government for investing the time and energy to try and resolve it with a reform that will command sufficient support in both houses to get it through.

So, given the current state of affairs, reform of the Lords, or the empty threat of it, is no solution to the wrecking amendments to the EU withdrawal bill that are currently being passed there.
The only remedy is to overturn the amendments when they return to the Commons.
Will there be a majority in the Commons to do so?

It’s just too soon to tell.

Following the Government defeat in the Lords on the customs union, we debated it in the Commons. The outcome was not conclusive (that has yet to come), but nevertheless the debate was instructive: the customs union’s advocates egged each other on; intervening in each other’s speeches to agree that they clearly saw the customs union and the single market as being one, and were opposed to leaving either, which begged the question ‘what then is the point of leaving the EU at all?’
At which point they cheered one another to the rafters.

So, at least they are transparent and hardly bother to cloak their intentions. We can all see where this is going…and yet these were the same members who lined up in the Article 50 debate to announce that, notwithstanding having campaigned to remain, they now accepted the will of the voters.
…Really?

Meanwhile the Lords moved on to the issue of a “meaningful vote” to follow the conclusion of the negotiations with the EU.
By ‘meaningful vote’ they mean not just having the ability to accept or reject the agreement reached, so that that, were Parliament to reject the agreement, then we won’t just leave the EU next March without any agreement and revert to World Trade Organisation rules.
On the contrary, they mean to give Parliament the power to determine exactly what happens next. This will include delaying, deferring, or cancelling our departure. In effect, the meaningful vote is to be even more meaningful than the referendum of June 2016 –and that is really what this is all about.

Of course, I can entirely understand the desire of elected representatives wishing to determine, or at the very least to influence the outcome of the negotiation process in what is, after all, a parliamentary democracy. The problem is that the very presence of a parliamentary meaningful vote at the end of the process fundamentally undermines our negotiating stance: it invites the EU to offer such poor terms with the confidence that Parliament will be bound to reject them.
Already there have been a number of meetings in Brussels between parliamentary opponents of BREXIT and the EU with the object of co-ordinating just such an outcome.

A well-funded campaign has begun, and which will continue for the rest of the year, with the object of persuading us all that we made a terrible mistake and that either we, or our Parliament must undo it.
Given the arguments that we heard about the customs union and the internal market in Parliament last week, it is clear that no agreement reached with the EU will ever be good enough to persuade the hard core of remainers to accept it.

As I have warned before in this column, their strategy is one of ‘demoralise and delay, in order to defeat’.
The question is whether we, as voters, have the stamina and the will to continue to demand that our decision be honoured.

There should be no surprise that the House of Lords has been doing its worst to neuter the Government’s EU Withdrawal Bill: I remind readers that I reported in this column on the 6^th March 2017, my debate with Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, and Lord Lester one of our leading lawyers, before a City of London audience, when they argued against the motion that ‘the UK is leaving the EU’ and made it clear in their speeches that their Lordship’s House would do everything to stop it.

The Key question is however, what will the Commons do?
And the key issue upon which that question will focus is the EU customs union. The Lords have already amended the Withdrawal Bill to require the UK to remain within the customs union.
Will the Commons follow their lead?

Of course, to do so would be extraordinary given that 80% of us voted less than a year ago for political parties committed explicitly to leave the customs union (whatever they have decided subsequently).
Desire to stay is bizarre: it would require us to hand over the conduct of our trade policy to EU officials without any influence over their decision making, their priorities, or any ability to hold them to account for their conduct of it.
Any trade deals negotiated between the EU and other third countries would require us to open our markets on the terms negotiated but without reciprocal concessions for us.
It is the daftest of policies. Why on earth would anyone contemplate it?
The answer is simple: it is at least one way of scuppering BREXIT.

The customs union is the essential core of the EU. It was there from the foundation and long predates the internal market. If you like, think of it as the walls of Mordor, it protects the fortress from trade from the rest of the world with a common external tariff. Or think of it as the “one ring to rule them all…and in the darkness bind them” as It holds the EU together in one mercantilist relationship against free trade with the world.

Remaining within it would be a betrayal of ‘taking back control’ and all that we voted for in the referendum, but there is no arguing with its adherents. It is the nearest thing to a religious belief. To accept the will of the people would, for them, be like denying the existence of their god.

Do not despair, the battle is not lost yet, but it will be very tight indeed.
If we were to lose it however, who would be to blame?
Don’t blame the Lords, they have no power if overawed by the Commons.
So blame the Commons, but remember that it was the voters who determined its current composition less than a year ago.

If we did lose that vote, whatever advisers in in Number 10 may do, or however few ministers resign, I will certainly be one of those shedding tears into my beer.

Irrespective of the action taken against Syria, whether it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, either way, ought Parliament to have voted first?

Giving the decision to Parliament is no guarantee as to the wisdom of the outcome. Exceptionally, we gave the decision whether to invade Iraq to Parliament, and look how that turned out.
I say ‘exceptionally’ because giving Parliament a vote on military action is a recent innovation.
Of all the military conflicts in which we have been involved (and there are a couple of hundred since 1800), Parliament voted on three: For the Iraq war; against attacking Assad in Syria, and in favour of air strikes against Daesh in Syria; and all of these in the last two decades.

It is an innovation of which I disapprove and I am glad that it now appears to have been abandoned.

The Government is accountable to Parliament for its decisions and the conduct of military operations, but it is not obliged to ask for Parliament’s prior permission.

The job of Parliament is to make the law, and government ministers must abide by that law, just as everyone else has to.
If Parliament wants to have a veto on military operations then it must pass a law to that effect. It is nonsense to have parliamentarians complaining about not being consulted first, when they make no legislative proposals to require it in future.

Ought Parliament to legislate to give itself decision making powers over military operations?
I believe it would be folly for us to do so.
It would make us the most unreliable of allies, and unable to give assurances with respect to military plans.
It would rob us of the most important of military advantages: the ability to use surprise and to take the initiative. This weakness alone, would invite an enemy to seize the initiative in the knowledge of our likely parliamentary procrastination.
In seeking to persuade Parliament to authorise military action, governments would be tempted to share intelligence with it. This would be extremely dangerous: Intelligence is vital, but its value lies in its very secrecy; it is important that an enemy does not know what we know, and what we do not know. If they discover what we know it is a short step to figuring out how we know it, so enabling them to take preventive measures.

Of course, those who would support the principle of prior parliamentary approval for military operations would be likely to try ameliorate these difficulties by making provision for emergency action by Government when there is simply no time to wait for a Parliamentary process. Herein lies perhaps the greatest danger: Governments potentially taking precipitate action in order to justify avoiding a difficult and possibly prolonged parliamentary proceeding, even for the best of motives.

Let Government deliberate on the basis of intelligence, military and legal advice, that is what Ministers are for.
If they get it wrong, they are accountable to Parliament for their decisions. Accordingly, if Parliament wants to, it can sack the Government.